Re: Tape drive

[Les Mikesell <lesmikesell gmail com>]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 22:11, Craig White wrote:

> > > Can anyone recommend a tape drive that meets these requirements?
> > > 
> > > 1) easy to get working in Fedora Core 3 & 4
> > > 2) reliable
> > > 3) works fine with Amanda
> > > 4) stores 200+ Gb on a tape or single set of tapes
> > > 
> > > If it's easy and obvious how to eject and insert tapes, that's a plus,
> > > since this is going to be in a location without any real techies.
> > > 
> > 
> > I would expect any SCSI drive to work. Choose your vendors and ask them: 
> > in this market they're well aware of Linux. Even Dell.
> > 

> I heavily recommend LTO technology. LTO 100 would store 100Gb
> uncompressed and amanda certainly works better if you use it without
> hardware compression. LTO 200 is 200Gb uncompressed.
> 
> You should also check out 'bacula' for backup as amanda is clearly not
> usable for 'location without any real techies'

Amanda is painless as far as making backups goes - all you
normally have to do is change the tape sometime during
the day and it will send email to remind you if you
forget and dump to a holding disk if you still don't
do it.  So, consider it if you can provide help if
a restore is needed - or you can use it for tapes that
are held offsite and only used for disaster recovery
and set up backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/)
for easy online access with disk based storage.  It
uses compression and linking of duplicate copies to
hold much more than you would expect.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell gmail com